torstai 30. huhtikuuta 2015

A last take on the Rubberdance colour challenge... took me this long to realize that the middle colour was grey, not violet! Sometimes these screens just turn the colours around. I am also posting this card for the SimonSaysStamp challenges Monday and Wednesday (Anything goes on both of them).

The threefold silver card base with a window is from a pack of card blanks I grabbed with me from Lidl last December. Actually also the A4 canvas pad I have is from Lidl, amazing things to be found in a super cheap food store! I painted the canvas ages ago, just squirted some red and white straight on it and blended them around. I realized that I've used almost all the image stamps that came with the grab bag I won from the Rubberdance February challenge except this dragonfly. It is a large one, but I decided to try it out on shrink plastic and colour it with blue to fit the challenge colours. After shrinking I covered the pieces with Glossy Accents. Love the shrinked detail!

I regret not having silver embossing powder, but I stamped my sentiment onto tissue paper with silver and heat embossed it with clear embossing powder. Actually I taped the piece onto ordinary copy paper and heated it from below, because the tissue paper is flammable. This was adhered to the canvas with Glue'nSeal.... in some light it shows well, and from some directions it is illegible -as said silver embossing powder would have been better, and if it was stamped straight on the canvas, part of the letters would probably not have shown at all.

keskiviikko 29. huhtikuuta 2015

The Stampinback April challenge has encouraged me to use the word "art" in multiple projects this month... this is obviously the last one, since April is soon through. I googled for sentiments with "art is" and one of the first ones was "art is the only way to run away without leaving home". It looked like a stamp, but I wasn't able to find out if it was, besides it felt a bit exaggerating: I claim people escape their daily lives with alcohol, drugs, computer games, internet, fb... Art and craft is of course much healthier than any of these. Besides the Stampinback challenge I am posting for the SimonSaysStamp challenges Monday (Anything goes) and Wednesday (CAS, the white page actually can be seen on this spread!)

The background of this spread is from using my art journal as "underpaper" ages ago for some inking, spraying and cleaning sprayed stencils... and now I arrived to this spread in my journal, and got to wonder what to do with it. The golden brown is Colour Bloom Tea Stain, the starlike flowers are from Stampinback and the swinging girl + sentiment stamp from VivaLasVegaStamps. There are some Tim Holtz stencils in the background and the branch is from Designs by Ryn (I really like that one, even though managed to make a bit of a mess with it here.

What I started with

Some gesso added with bubble wrap

If there was a delete funktion in craft, I might scroll back to this...or perhaps I should learn to stop?

I sprayed too close to my stencil, so the ink bled underneath :(

The branch looked so heavy I added copper Sharpie to the text and stampingand covered the branch with crackle paste.

It' time for Whats On Your Workdesk -Wednesday again! What this is all about is explained at the Stamping Ground. Here's my desk this misty morning:

I can see loads of rubber stamps (actually the largest pile is outside the pic on the left), a dangerous pile on top of the gesso jar and a dirty stencil on top of the box where I have gel pens. I don't like having stuff piled on each other...wonder how I ended up in this situation! The gel pens are out because I played with shrink plastic yesterday, the dragonfly stamp, Stazon ink and resulting little dragonflies can also be found. It is to be seen if I manage to make a last entry for the Rubberdance April challenge with them... time is running short, it surely flies! The table is too full, so my art journal is on the sofa next to me

You can see my new Cuttlebug on the right edge, haven't used it yet. The branch stencil has been used in the art journal and the large envelope on the sofa is my "trash bin", just changed it, so it is quite empty (but looking at that table I suspect I should start filling it :) That's all folks! Snoop around and comment if you wish, or just hop to the Stamping Ground and bounce to other (tidier?) workspaces around the world.

For these ATC:s I have used products recently ordered from Stampinback in the Netherlands: coated cardstock, brusho-like Bister and Colorit powders and fern stamps from the Idiot Flowers set II. Actually even the Stazon ink is probably from the same cart. The bister-powders are very down to earth and dark: I sprinkled a bit of blue Bister for my night and light blue Colorit for my day... it so happened that when the Bister dried, it turned dark green, so I ended up adding some black Bister and some blue Colorit-powder to the night backgound. I stamped the two ferns with Stazon jet black and proceeded with a waterbrush and the bleach. Magic happened and the plants became pale! I added some green colour with Distress markers, but it kept turning grey... perhaps the leftover bleach has something to do with that? So I added some shades of darker green and touches of white Sharpie for extra interest.

I thought I was finished at this point, but ended up continuing with a third fern and the text (VivaLasVegaStamps steampunk letters).

maanantai 27. huhtikuuta 2015

My box of 10 kraft cards is done! This last pair of cards is actually what I originally planned for the first pair, wanting to enjoy the beauty of crackle paste and some simple background stamping in black. I am posting these cards for the Country View April challenge (kraft) and the SimonSaysStamp challenges Wednesday (CAS) and Monday (Anything goes).

I especially like this one with the TCW cornflower stencil and a text background.

The branch stencil was more difficult to handle than the cornflower: some paste seeped under the stencil smudging the image. I guess the different orientations of the openings in the stencil have something to do with it. I decided to colour the smudges with a Distress Marker (Brushed Corduroy), the other option would have been to layer a sentiment over it. I guess I can live with it -everything doesn't have to be perfect :)

Since I have two children whose teachers will change after this school year I think a box of cards might end up as a gift at the end of this school year. The other cards in this set can be found under the following links: 1+2, 3+4, 5+6, 7+8.

sunnuntai 26. huhtikuuta 2015

The Chocolate Baroque colour challenge is asking for orange, purple, pink and maroon. Since purple is part of the colour range once again, I decided to continue the tweet tweet ATC:s I have made for the two previous challenges. I chose to use the bouncy springy birds this time, so I can enter for the Stampotique Designers challenge (springs) as well.

I inked my background with Distress Inks and stamped with a stamp from the CB Texture Fragments set. Then I went through my drawer of underpapers trying to find sheets with orange and pink, and stamped the birds on several surfaces. Because the springs would have been almost impossible to cut out, I stamped the image on the ATC base and heat embossed with black embossing powder. I pieced together the birds, the one on the "front" has been mounted on foam tape. I finished of the image by adding some silver sharpie on the springs.

This time I took inspiration from this post on the Country View blog, where the DT and guests have of course worked with kraft all month. I skipped the gesso, background stamping and sewed texture... But built a background using washi tapes and splatters of paint.

All the stamps are from VivaLasVegaStamps. The texts were stamped straight on the card base and the images on silk card (Crafty Individuals) and heat embossed with clear embossing powder. I decided they looked cool and photographic as they were, so I left them uncoloured.

perjantai 24. huhtikuuta 2015

The background is paper collage on an ugly card, covered with gesso and ink sprays. Somehow there is even a crackle effect to be seen! The sentiment is from Stampinback, all the other stamps from VLVS. I didn't plan this as well as I should have, because I ended up with the bike floating in the air... I thought I could live with it and mounted the piece on a card blank, but after sleeping a night I masked the edges and the bike and built a road of some sort using text and a small circle stamp.

I started by making a collage from scraps of underpaper with stamped images (experiments from previous projects). The green stamps are from Chocolate Baroque and the black ones from VivaLasVegaStamps. I was surprised how a thin layer of gesso and ink sprays were able to bind the background into a scene! It almost felt a pity to add the umbrella and blue flowers, at least I had some trouble making them feel like a part of the image, not just something I had to place there...

Blue anemones are just starting to bloom here, so they were my choice for the "blue" even though the shrubbery in my scene looks more like the places where white anemones grow. I added sewing for texture, I think the "hanging" raindrops are quite fun.

keskiviikko 22. huhtikuuta 2015

It's Wednesday again and that means Julias' blog is hosting a hop around neat and messy desks/workspaces around the world. Here is mine (= the messy kind).

I took this picture from the opposite side of the table... This is what my family sees and then they complain why mom makes such a mess! Right now this is about as bad as it gets before I have to clear everything up. I've spread my stuff to both right and left on the sofa.

The boxes on the sofa are empty, I already hid away my new stash (paints, stamps, stencils, what more could a procraftinator wish for?... Well, actually I have a Cuttlebug still on the way :) and talking about new stash and techniques, I won some digistamps from Nikki, they arrived, thanks!

I'm working on a niche project for the Paperartsy challenge. Once that is done, I'll clean up the whole table and start a new mess with a couple of other April projects... Nothing interesting here for me, I look at this all the time! Snoop around as much as you like, I'm heading of to the Stamping Ground blog to see what others are doing.

When the Paperartsy niche-challenge was published, I knew I wanted to create a shrine like niche for this ATC that I posted too late for the previous PA Grunge Paste challenge.

I used three layers of thick corrugated cardboard to create the niche, covered it with old book papers (these are sermons from about 1850), added some gesso and colour with paints and a flower stamp and some stars. Thanks to this niche post on the PA blog: I used a star stencil and modelling paste on the tissue in stead of trying to stencil straight on the frame. It always surprises me how the tissue paper "dissapears" when it is burnished with plenty of glue!

After mounting the ATC on scrap card I covered the back with the same papers, paints stamp and stars. I finished my project with some hanging stars (pierced through the frame with a sewing needle, if I had planned well enough, the ends of the threads would be glued under the papers used to cover the back) and a bouquet made with the same PA mini flower that I used on the frame, just trimmed a bit lower and the stem separated from the leaves. I pierced a small hole in the niche with a craft knife blade and stuck the bouquet in place.